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Waste Management in the News, 2019–2026: Attention, Geography and Tone of Global Waste Coverage, and How It Compares with Research and Invention

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: We measure how waste management was covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 101,095 de-duplicated articles about the collection, disposal, treatment and recycling of waste, and set that coverage beside 49,802 research papers and 101,798 patent families on the same subject. Six results stand out: A steady, low share of attention. Waste management took 8.05 of every 10,000 news articles in 2019 and 6.66 in 2025. The low point was 2020, at 5.73, which is 28.8% below 2019. Coverage has almost no seasonality: no month holds more than 8.96% of a typical year's articles. Geography. India's share of located waste management news is 1.55 times its share of all news. The United States, the largest source of located articles (33.54%), is under-represented at 0.69. Indonesia (5.31), Jamaica (5.19), the Philippines (4.23) and Malaysia (4.15) are the most over-represented countries, and Africa (2.14) the most over-represented continent. States. Within India, Chandigarh (4.72), Goa (2.83) and Haryana (2.1) lead by lift, and Bihar (0.36) trails. Within the United States, North Dakota (2.55), Oregon (2.22) and Missouri (2.2) lead, and New Jersey (0.2) trails. Tone and urgency. 64.3% of waste management articles are positive in tone (all news: 56.8%), while the negative share (33.2%) matches all news (33.6%). Yet 60.8% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Measurement. 33.9% of raw matches for waste vocabulary were templated feeds, advertising pages, stock-market items or repeated items. Counting them would inflate coverage and distort its geography. Research and invention. Waste management papers grew from 4.79 to 9.76 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2025, a 2.04-fold rise in share. Patent families published per year grew 3.24-fold from 2015 to 2024, and 94.6% of office filings were in China.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23445760
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222865014
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